Gamebooks

[Barrington Boots]

The one place I found that mentions anything relevant seems to suggest that the number of zombies you kill depends on the roll of the dice. Seems like a poor idea, but I guess I'll have to play it to find out.
A quick skim through the book shows that you're told how many zombies there are in any given fight, and the last section indicates that the number of zombies killed determines your success, so I'd assumed that the winning route is just wherever you encounter the correct number of zombies. But you suggest there's some other bug?

Yeah. In every combat you face x zombies, roll a dice for your weapon and kill y zombies, and then you take 1 damage for each one left standing. To complete the book you have to have killed every single zombie, otherwise when you get to the end you lose.

That in itself isn't a lot of fun, but the problem with it is that it's not actually possible to survive the book even with max stamina. I understand the reprint allows you 20d6+20 stamina which is still not enough, even if you ignore the max stamina cap (the book doesn't actually say you can't go over initial stamina). There's too much damage to take, and not enough healing.
I think I ignored my stamina in the end and finished on -30 or thereabouts. It could be playable with some modding, but the whole book feels like an unplaytested, botched attempt to update FF and it wasn't fun to play.

I did a quick review of it somewhere on this thread where I moaned in more detail, I think. If you do give it a go I hope you have a better experience that I did!

[karlos]

Thanks for the recommendations, chaps

[Funt Solo]

Cassettes don't even have the nice bits that vinyl does

So, you didn't like rewinding them with a pencil? Or when they snapped? Or got chewed up?

[Fortnight]

I find that web usability in general has sort of fallen of a cliff and been eaten by scavengers. But then I'm still using a PC, so am one of the few. I will fade into the darkness, along with keyboards, and everything will be replaced by "Siri - tell the AI to make me a song that I want to listen to!"

There's a silent army of us determined obstinate old-skool desktop, keyboard & mouse users out there. You can't do anything significant on a phone - it's only for the social media-obsessed layabouts. And yet there are websites that cater for only phone users. "It'll work fine on desktop" they say, and it works, but like crap with a massive waste of screen real-estate. Bah. etc
There's a new world out there and not all of it is good. My newest PC doesn't have an optical drive. Doesn't even have a bay for one. 

Within the metal scene (possibly other music scenes too?) there's been a swing towards putting stuff on cassette again. As far as I can see it's a mix of nostalgia and elitism: backlash against digital music and CDs that fetishises a format thats crap and we moved on from for good reason. Cassettes don't even have the nice bits that vinyl does (giant artwork, lovely smell, weird ritualistic nature of having to go to the effort of putting one on) and their only benefit is that they're very small and portable, which doesn't stack against modern music formats, so for me its very much regression for the sake of regression.

I buy a lot of electronic music and there there's certainly a revival in cassettes that has been getting gradually stronger for a few years now. I tend to buy CDs when I can because I like to get a physical format. I'll also get a different physical format if there's something I want that's not available in CD or lossless download. I use bandcamp a lot so almost everything comes as digital download, and mostly I'm happy with that. I get the physical for collectability too, if I fancy it. For certain artists.
I bought this on preorder. No download version, so I had to get the tape, plus it's a nice package (not cheap, plus postage!). Then bloody qobuz went and sold a download version for a few quid. Bastards.

It could be playable with some modding, but the whole book feels like an unplaytested, botched attempt to update FF and it wasn't fun to play.

Sounds like I may decide to play Blood of the Zombies with d20 where it expects d6. Either when rolling stats or in combat. Or both!

[Barrington Boots]

Fangs of Fury

The plot is that your city, Zamarra, is under siege from the forces of Ostragoth the Grim (who doesn't appear in this book) and his wizard Jaxartes (who does). You're a generic rank and file soldier who has been volunteered to break out of the city and relight a magic fire in a volcano (The titular Fangs of Fury) that will power up some big dragon-shaped defensive weapons on Zamarra and defeat the besiegers. Zamarra has 14 walls and as well as the magic torch of relighting you're given a bracelet that will tell you when all 14 walls are broken through, at which point it will kill you. This is a weird touch as knowing the walls are down and everyone you know and love is dead should be enough for a game over condition and it feels like the killer bracelet would be better served if you were some kind of, say, captured master thief that might be better suited to sneaking out of the siege and into the volcano rather than some random mook who didn't even know what the mission was until the bracelet was on his wrist: it makes the rulers of Zamarra look pretty dumb for entrusting this mission to literally the first guy who stuck his hand up for a random task.

The city masters give you some black magic cubes and a pack of food and then you're straight down a tunnel and off you go. After wandering around in the tunnels for a bit I dug myself out by the coast where the enemy war fleet is at anchor. Some guy spots me and enlists me into moving a catapult, which I go along with so as not to get noticed before an orc takes me and some other conscripts off to load some prisoners onto some boats. I have to choose a boat, which is randomly leaky and sinks, but I swim to the other one (its the end for the prisoners in that boat, sadly) and we land at an island where prisoners are building siege weapons (not sure why this is not being done not on an island away from the fighting which will then necessitate shipping all the siege engines back to the mainland, but there you go. It meant there could be a boat bit!).

On the island I'm watching prisoners chop wood. One of them runs off but gets caught by a goblin: I intervene, kill the goblin, and then the prisoner runs off and nothing more is made of this. Instead I go back to the prisoners where an obvious monk guy is chopping wood like a madman. He asks me to join him in a clump of bushes where he tells me I'm the chosen torchbearer of prophecy and some other nonsense. He's a monk of XEN, which is a secret religion and saying its name means you must die in a year and a day (this seems a harsh religious stricture) which of course he tells me, dooming himself to some mysterious death. He says that Jaxartes the evil wizard is killing his order who guard the flames at the Fangs of Fury and I should look out for the Wazzari Silent Knights who are a bunch of knights sworn to silence and also part of this religion and can help me. Then some goblins appear and I charge off into the bushes without another thought.
(During this very strange interlude the monk also tells me that whenever I see an illustration in the book I should look for white cubes in it, and if I see any I can pick up D6 white cubes. More on this later.)

I run down some random paths in the wood until I find a shack with an old man in it who asks me to come in and then gives me a bowl of beans to eat which explode in my face and traps me in chains of smoke before some orcs jump off his roof, kill him and capture me. This sort of weirdness is par for the course with this book and all takes place in a single paragraph.

The orcs lead me off for a bit, then start dividing up some loot from the old mans hut. I easily get them to start fighting each other over unfair division of the spoils: they kill each other, then a wizard turns up in a magic chariot, tries to charm me back with a spell, then gives up  and vanishes and I run off again. WTF.
I then arrive at a port, stand in some random lines, board a ship but after several hours that ship is attacked by pirates, sinks, and I escape on a raft. That bit all happens in a single paragraph too (two if you include a sailor climbing onto my raft and attacking me for no reason)
Eventually I wash up on some land and enter a village where I take the time to chill on a bench and see a little girl walking past drop her bag of rice. I choose to help her pick it all up, she gives the rice to a waiting cart driver (who I assume did not help with the rice), runs into school, gets caned for being late, I run in and cut the teachers cane in half and then tell him why the girl was late: he apologises, then a trumpet sounds and everyone runs out. Yeah, this all happens in one paragraph too. If you're getting a bit sick of this series of random encounters where I don't have much agency, I was too at this point.

So anyway - the little girl is the ward of an elderly monk, who is a member of the Wazarri (but not a silent knight) who makes me play a dice game to see how enlightened I am. I end up moderately enlightened so he gives me access to the secret alphabet of the Wazarri (a bit like semaphore - it's shown in an illustration that I have to refer back to a LOT) and then as a bonus also tells me he follows XEN, guaranteeing his on death which is a shame as I already knew about that, before giving me some black cubes and sending me on my way!
I'm told there's evil riders on the roads so I head into the forest. Here the Wazarri alphabet comes in handy as there are some clues to the endless left or right choices I've been making at random, some of which give me some more black cubes. I'm then ambushed by a giant 2 headed fire breathing serpent. Given the choice of fight or flight I choose the latter and am able to run through the flames unharmed although one of my black cubes crumbles to dust as I do. The black cubes are anti-fire cubes! The serpent isn't mentioned again so presumably doesn't give chase.

Onwards through the forest I find a mound of earth with an inscribed block of stone on top and a neat little number puzzle, which I solve (its XEN related) and a ghost appears and tells me to follow the forest path North but not to cross the bridge and look for the warrior with the first of fire. Alright!
Unhelpfully the path choices are left, right and straight on. I assume I'm already going north and continue straight, which seems to be right as I reach the bridge, cross the stream and then spot a fist made of fire rising into the sky over a hill, so I charge over there and find a lady knight battling some Garks. I pile in and help, and she wordlessly thanks me (for she is of the non-speaking knights) and leads me through some secret paths to a hidden fort, surrounded by a ring of fire and beyond that, surrounded by an army of goblins and dark elves!

The knight (which the book refers to as 'the girl') takes me through the flames - which cooks a couple of opportunistic goblins who make a rush for it behind us -  and inside I'm dismayed to find there's only about half a dozen knights, some squires and children, all quite badly beat up. Thankfully the squires aren't sworn to silence so after telling me I'm the chosen one etc one leads me to the head knight, who is sitting in the middle of three chairs and indicates I should sit in one. I must have missed the clue to this (if there is one) but I choose one at random and he is pleased because I'm told I've fulfilled the prophecy of Te-Okin and now get to look at a map of some catacombs (this is another page I need to refer back to a lot) with some odd symbols on it that will apparently lead me to the Fangs of Fury.  I'm then given some food and led out and told to go to a nearby flat topped mountain. Sadly I don't have 'elf wings' when the text prompts me (I am disappointed to have missed this!) and so have an arduous climb up. At the top, the mountain has three large holes in it forming the point of a triangle and I'm prompted to randomly jump down one. Ok.

This leads me into the catacomb part of the book. It's essentially a maze, with various chambers each containing wooden blocks of various shapes and some clues in Wazarri semaphore. It takes me some time to get my bearings, despite flicking back to the map illustration, but to cut a long story short I eventually manage to recover all the blocks I need and a key. I also find a room with some poorly described vials in it. I open one and some black mist rushes out and strangles me. GAME OVER.

I'm not impressed by this random Deathtrap-Dungeon-esque death and have not been enjoying the book enough to restart so I just flick back to a previous paragraph, don't open the vials and use the blocks to open a door to reveal the fangs of fury at last!
The fangs are described as five upraised teeth around a smoking volcanic centre. I'm also told that Jaxartes himself is here! I randomly follow a path into the volcano until some Wazzari text keeps me on the right track (at this point my elf wings would have melted in the heat, sad days). I collect some more black cubes and face the first tough fight of the game (A mage warrior of Jaxartes with Skill 8, but I'm at -2 skill as I don't have a wand sword. Luckily I have tons of provisions).
With that goon dispatched I enter a large chamber with seven entrances. 2 monks suddenly appear and ask how many white cubes I have, as that determines how enlightened I am (ok) and also which path I may take to the heart of the volcano. I don't have that many and have to go via door three, where I solve a pretty simple XEN-based puzzle and go through a door into the next bit of the volcano. Easy! More black cubes are needed here to avoid stamina damage but I have tons of these.

I then enter a tomb, where several monks are interred: scattered about them are the charred remains of Jaxartes mage warriors. An ape monster leaps out of a passage, says it is 'Grokkar, defender of the tombs of the dead' and shoots some fireballs at me. My black cubes do nothing here for some reason and its down to luck tests. I get blown up but don't die, Grokkar isn't mentioned again, off I go.
Finally, I reach the ornate entrance to the furnace: the centre of the mountain. Jaxartes is there, chuckling away, and the flame has been extinguished (this is presented as a big shock to me, even though it is the entire point of the quest). He makes an evildoer speech, grows to giant size and begins hurling sheets of fire at me. But wait! Suddenly a giant cube pops out of the ground with fifty locks on it. I've got a key with a number on it, so I put it into the lock (presumably not being burned up by Jaxartes). The flame rekindles and Jaxartes burns to death in a huge random anticlimax! Yay!

I collapse and when I awake I am in a cool room overlooking a green valley with a girl wiping my forehead. I ask where I am and she tells me I'm in the Wazarri monastery and gives me a crystal ball where I can see the 'fangs of fury' on the city walls turn into dragons and burn Ostragoths army to bits. The winner! The bracelet 'suddenly' (there are so many 'suddenly' moments in this book) turns from an explosive tag into a bracelet studded with precious stones! I then go back to the city and get promoted to commander in chief and all is well. THE END.

[Barrington Boots]

So I groaned inwardly when I saw this was another Luke Sharp book and overall I wasn't very impressed with this one: although it's better than Star Strider and Chasms of Malice, it wasn't as good as Daggers of Darkness. It's not a crap book, it's just a bit... meh. Even the title and cover artwork are a bit uninspiring and I'm fairly sure I'll have forgotten 90% of this within a few months.

The story moves from encounter to encounter with rapid pace, which means it crams in a lot of interesting ideas but also is part of the problem, and the whole thing just doesn't hang together well. It doesn't help that his prose is quite curt and there's more than a few occasions where you're doing something and then 'suddenly orcs jump off the roof' or 'suddenly a bird takes the document out your hands'. It's a bit like playing D&D with a younger sibling who feels the need to jazz things up every 5 minutes: the story leaps about so much that it feels like nothing really makes sense. A good example is when I was captured by orcs who start arguing, then 'suddenly' a 'figure' appears in a chariot and tries to capture me, and when I beat the test the figure 'sat down exhausted' and then vanished and its onto the next bit. Who was the guy here? What happened to his chariot? It feels like a lot of ideas thrown at you at random, but so tersely described its's just a connection of 'this happens! That happens!' stuff hurled at you with almost no context.

The cube thing is a good idea, if abstract: however I had about 20 black cubes and only needed a handful and although I didn't have many white cubes it was pretty easy to offset this. The coded language thing on the other hand was a pain, it was annoying to have to keep flicking back to the image to decode things. The maze was also annoying until I figured it out (another image to have to keep flicking back to) - without the map it would have been a nightmare, because exits are listed as 'exit 1, exit 2' and so on rather than north, east, west etc. The mechanic to keep track of the walls falling seemed a bit pointless, as I never got anywhere near losing even half of the walls around Zamarra.

As with Luke Sharp FF there's a lot of 'choose x or y' bits with no context, often something fairly innocuous (twice I had to choose between two identical queues of people) than impacts things. There were also a lot of his favoured 'roll 2 dice to see how fast your horse and the other guys is' or 'roll to see how many rocks hit you' mechanics which personally I am not a fan of. One part had me test my luck three times in succession to dodge fireballs and failing all three (likely, as each luck test reduces your luck by one and there are quite a lot of luck tests) is auto death (the monster that fires the fireballs at you appears from nowhere, does this and then vanishes, another good example of what I didn't like about this one)

I also had a bit of issue with all the female characters being described as girls. A couple of times I aided warrior women from an attack and the text was all 'the girl' thanks you etc. I know it's an older book, but this annoyed me.

Art is by Dave Gallagher and it's a mixed bag: some images are very cool, others aren't the strongest. It's very old school fantasy art in nature (think early D&D etc) but when put against other FF art, it doesn't really impress. However.. the concept of finding the white cubes in the art is a really good one, and in some of the pictures these are very well hidden. Once you know what to look for this leads to you studying the images a bit more and therefore getting more out of it. This is one of the best uses of art I have encountered in a FF book.

Mainly negative then, but that said, the book does have a lot of quirky (if rushed) encounters and having had a couple of other attempts at it, there's no true path or shopping list and you can just meander your own way to the end without much worry - especially as its pretty easy with no really difficult battles although you do need a strong luck, or a potion of luck. My stamina was never in danger, despite regular losses, due to lots of provisions and restorative aid.
There being no 'big bad' is a bit anticlimactic but also kind of refreshing and it was quite a change to have a couple of paragraphs after I'd won before moving onto the classic paragraph 400. Also there is someone riding fangtigers again!

Overall a very quick book and not a memorable one. I've heard that the 40s are almost all excellent FF books so looking forward to getting into those next..

[Trooper McFad]

Wow Boots that is some length of a review. I'll wait till lunchtime to read this - looking forward to it as I've always enjoyed these 👍🏻

[Richard]

That review made me laugh several times! It does sound like a ridiculous book, and I'm impressed that you persevered with it. No wonder I can't remember anything about it!

[Trooper McFad]

Read your review and you always bring these adventures to life.

Do you write the review (or at least take short hand notes) as you go or is it all off memory at the end?

As much as you highlighted the downsides of this game I still enjoyed the read through.

Hope you enjoy your next book more and I'll look forward to the review.

[Barrington Boots]

Thank you guys! Not my favourite book but was one of my favourite write ups I think!

I take notes as I go, do my conclusion as soon as I finish, and then go back and convert the playthrough into something legible. Bit long winded but it keeps a middle-aged man occupied.

[Fortnight]

It's a shame when a gamebook disappoints as this one obviously did. Fun write-up though. It sound like it might have been an enjoyable play with fewer dice rolling tests and a less prosaic text.
Fangs of Fury, Dead of Night, and Master of Chaos are all ones that don't inspire me with much enthusiasm for playing, just by their general look and generic titles.
I'm quite interested in Black Vein Prophecy though. That's a great title.

[Richard]

Master of Chaos is a brilliant book! One of my favourites. 

[Fortnight]

Good to hear it! Nice to know it's not a steady decline until they fizzle out.

[Barrington Boots]

The Soul-eater is by far the deadliest opponent I have yet encountered. Its stats alone tell me that I am not likely to survive this fight, but then the text tells me that in addition to the normal combat rules, I will automatically lose 1 willpower point and 2 endurance points every round in addition to regular damage!

I'm on a hiding to nothing here. My endurance and willpower scores are already too low, and I just can't afford this kind of attrition. And that's a moot point anyway, because the monster's combat skill is NINE POINTS higher than mine, and that's a lot! I sigh, knowing the outcome is inevitable, even though I only have to survive four attack rounds before something is going to interrupt the fight, and begin combat. I am killed in the fourth round.

Bit of a necro-quote but I've just finished playing through Grey Star and this monster absolutely mullered me in exactly the same way as this! I went into the fourth round on 2 endurance. I  honestly can't see a way through this fight without rolling at least one ten on the random number table, and even then I'd have died afterwards when Tanith did.

Other than that bit, I really enjoyed this book and re-reading your playthrough, made almost entirely the same set as choices you did! Its rich in atmosphere, it's got unconventional encounters, and two really good companions who it's painful to lose, rather than just 'oh well, Mungo died, anyway' like in a lot of books.
I'll hopefully have a go at the others in the series on Project Aon.

[Richard]

It is a really good book, and I'm glad you're enjoying it. It's just a shame it becomes so unfair on the home stretch!

Looking forward to hearing about the others in that series.